Tilehurst school All Saints Infants wants to expand into a full primary and has identified nearby vacant council property August House which it wants to convert into a 120-place school.

But last week it faced a setback when Reading Borough Council’s full council meeting recommended putting August House on the market, giving campaigners less time to pursue funding options. A crunch decision on the sale will be made by cabinet on Monday.

Chairman of governors Caum Macleod explains why the school expansion matters to Reading:

On July 12, Reading Borough Council will decide whether to allow All Saints School six more months to try to turn the property opposite into a small primary school, or whether to sell the land to property developers.

The interest that will be foregone will be somewhere between £10k and £22k, depending on when we hand back the building if we cannot get the project secure in that time-frame.

Having been heavily involved in this debate, I have major concerns that the ‘Big Society’ idea espoused by central government is not yet fully understood by our own council.

When a small school was built next to a brand new church in the suburbs of Reading in 1865, education was not a right for all of us and All Saints was not even state-funded.

All Saints School was popular immediately, taking in more than 120 pupils in its first year. I wonder if the people who created it could have imagined that children between the ages of four and seven would still be using the same building for education, now filled with new technology, colour and laughter, more than 150 years later.

All Saints remains a thriving small school supported by the community around it, but is now an anomaly within the Reading school system with its infant school status and need to hand children to other schools when they reach the age of seven. This has caused a major issue this year as the 15 children leaving the school have had difficulty finding an appropriate school. So the All Saints governing body has, for about four months now, been looking at the possibility, in the new political era, of turning All Saints into a distinctive, small free primary school in the heart of West Reading.

We have been delighted by the offers of help we have had from people in Reading. We have had architects, builders, academy project managers, eco-school designers, parents, community members, church members, mortgage brokers, vicars, teachers from other primary schools and even a professional education firm offer or provide help. All these people and organisations live or are located within Reading boundaries.

I think that the councillors will set the tone for the next four years on July 12.

Will they be a ‘slash and burn’ council who make cuts, whatever the cost and pain, in order to balance books or will they recognise that Reading is blessed with some exceptionally gifted people who want to help the town solve its financial crisis by offering up their talents?

They could signal the latter by letting this small experiment – that fits perfectly with the origins of the school 150 years ago – develop, flourish and maybe even solve part of the school places problem, at minimal cost to the council. This was, after all, how the school started.